UPCOMING EVENTS

Breath in….and breath out…….whoo that is some nice irradiated air! No, not the air by the whore house, or the casino floor, or over by that city of burning bodies! Just go on a mountain and look at all the stuff before you! Obviously, I'm talking about Fallout: New Vegas (NV).

NV is a new Fallout game created by the open world RPG genius's Bethesda Softworks and Obsidian Software, and this time they have taken on the land around Las Vegas to be the setting of the game per say to Fallout 3 (F3) which took place in the ruined land of Washington DC. This game takes place during the actions of F3 but as far as I am into the game they don't have any pertinence in the game other than it's supposed to set a time period. Ive played for about 25 hours so far and someone told me im about 1/6 of the way through the story.

Now that we have the setting, lets talk art. NV uses the same engine as F3, so for you Xbox 360 and PS3 Players it may seem a little outdated. If your playing on PC like me though, the graphics are simply phenomenal. The game has a slightly color different pallette to the one used in F3. The main and most noticeable difference is that it has a more orange-ish tint now rather than the light green glow that was all of the wasteland of Washington DC. Your Pip-Boy is even defaulted at amber color in NV and you know what, it fits better than green in this game anyways.

The game sports some new features as well. There are actually a surprising amount of tweaks and new game play elements in the game. This game is a sequel and establishes that very early on in game, so don't worry about feeling like this is an expansion pack. Its not. I Promise ;) For starters new perks have been added. For example, Far Sight. When wearing glasses, perception plus 1, but if your not wearing glasses perception minus 1. There are new skills too that you WILL need to invest some points into early game. Specifically Survivalist, which increases your base HP and the amount of health you get from food. May sound stupid, but later on in the review i will talk about why it is necessary to rank the skill. New weapons are in NV, and guess what? THEY HAVE IRON SIGHTS! Yes, the most uselss feature in the whole game, yet a nice touch I guess. For those of you who hate the iron sights on the guns (Me), you can switch to the default zoom into the crosshair mode like in F3 in the options. Iron sights might suck for some users, but the new weapon mods do not. You can mod any gun to do just about anything you want. Like have a bigger clip, more accuracy, etc. It feels very natural in this game. One more thing to mention is that when you go into 3rd person, you no longer can see the most failed animating known to man which was your ridiculous moonwalking that you did in F3 when you were in 3rd person.

For all the good in the game, there are still some issues. One of the main ones for me is the complexity of the relationship mechanic that you can develop within factions of people in the game alongside the normal karma system from F3. It starts out easy and gets overcomplicated fast when you start traveling and doing side quests. Maybe I'm just stupid or maybe I'm just trying to please everyone but I personally do not like the new game mechanic. It gets really annoying when two of your favorite factions are killing each other and you have to pick a side or they both die (Thats happened twice). Lets make it clear, i don't think the mechanic is badly designed. Some people are going to love it. I also think that its just going to make people frustrated like me. Also something a little frustrating is the fact that food now heals over time rather than just hraling you all at once like it did in F3.

Fallout: New Vegas is an amazing game. It has basically only one major drawback, and sadly that drawback is an integral part of the game. It's a game that has the ability to pull you in with the amazing voice acting, story, and scene progression. Although sometimes it may make you want to through your mouse/keyboard/controller/remote/move/wii/tv/grandma out a window in frustration.